I’ve seen reports and studies that show products advertised as including / involving AI are off-putting to consumers. And this matches what almost every person I hear irl or online says. Regardless of whether they think that in the long-term AI will be useful, problematic or apocalyptic, nobody is impressed Spotify offering a “AI DJ” or “AI coffee machines”.
I understand that AI tech companies might want to promote their own AI products if they think there’s a market for them. And they might even try to create a market by hyping the possibilities of “AI”. But rebranding your existing service or algorithms as being AI seems like super dumb move, obviously stupid for tech literate people and off-putting / scary for others. Have they just completely misjudged the world’s enthusiasm for this buzzword? Or is there some other reason?
Hype brings investment money to the table. When an emerging technology appears, you can say we are looking to develop those technologies into our existing products and you will see a bump up in your share price.
After a few years of failed products and the hype dies for the next thing you can never mention the old hype but keep the bump in share price.
Think about 5-7 years ago, Blockchain was all the hype, 5-7 before then was Machine Learning and XaaS, before that was Big Data.
Yeah, investors kind of amplify hype. When there is hype, you will have some investors investing money.
If there’s investors investing money, it makes sense for other investors to try to invest first, so that their invested money gains value (the share price rises).
And then it becomes somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy, because suddenly you do have companies equipped with money to pursue that hype, which can feed back into the hype.But similarly, you’ll eventually reach a point where it does not live up to the inflated hype and then shareholders can just as well be extremely quick to pull out their money and amplify the crash.
Investors also know not every product will sell. So pad the bet and spread wide to increase your chances to score big.
The dumbest part about all of this is that the “AI” that’s currently building up all the hype is just machine learning
My understanding is that a lot of venture capitalist funding is driven by gut feel and personal connection. Like, they’ll tell you that they’re the vanguard of the future with a vision, but most of the time they’re just cliquey bros going “dude, sick” and burning money.
There’s an anecdote in the book “the cold start problem” about how zoom got funding even though the guys funding it thought it was a solved problem, that a new video company wouldn’t go anywhere, but the zoom guy was their bro so they gave him millions of dollars.
I feel like it’s possible some future will look back at this the way we look at feudalism. Just like, that’s such a bad system , why did people put up with it?
Just like, that’s such a bad system , why did people put up with it?
Because hindsight is 20/20 and people had preconceptions back then that filled in the gaps, as they do right now.
The gaps are and were actually full of nonsense like “he’s my buddy I’ll give him money” but people expect the process to be a lot more reliable and solid, because they think they’d be more careful with that kind of money, not realising that to some millions are pocket change (and nobody is careful with pocket change) and that others gamble with other people’s money and thus are a lot more cavalier.
Suits heard about this secret sauce called AI that can cut down on the need for those pesky humans that are always looking for handouts and luxuries like a living wage and benefits. The consumer will have to accept it when the only choices they’re offered are varying flavors of the same shit.
(but also it doesn’t work and they are, in fact, just dumb)
And then when it doesn’t work, you blame other people and fire humans anyway and give yourself a raise for saving the company money. Stock prices rise.
Can confirm this is absolutely true. The number of meetings I’ve been in where execs are salivating…
Whereas in reality so far the payoffs are projected to be something like 2%. Not counting the costs of developing and running the AI stuff.
Attracts investors.
When people are evaluating companies, and see a company missing out on the current trend, how is that going to factor into their valuation of the stock prices?
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OpenAI struck gold, NVIDIA followed suit, and everyone else bought shovels hoping to get investors even though they have no plans on striking gold (developing useful AI).
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Would you like to buy a timeshare to the moon? If we all buy, you’ll be able to sell your spot for 10x the price! Don’t wait! Spots are limited!
Nvidia is the biggest shovel seller out there.
Nvidia sells the hardware (shovels), but also develops portions of the software to make it run more efficiently, like OpenAI. Nobody else but Microsoft seems to be actually developing software, though AMD is slowly working towards having comparable performance.
We kinda need to adapt the saying now. When someone finds gold, you need to sell wood and iron for all the shovel makers that will show up.
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Because the boss thinks it sounds cool and doesn’t want to be the only kid in the block without an AI product to sell.
Money was already spent. The hype companies were backed by big capital in their early days. Now the people who provided that capital want to cash out and they want their winnings. So you will have AI shoved down your throat on every piece of media channel those people also own. AI is a hype term that appears periodically since before the 2000s. This is nothing new. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
LLMs are toys that sparkle for a brief moment. Their value is laughable compared to their cost.
Because it attracts shareholders
I was discussing this with a friend. We came to the conclusion that “entrepreneur” means “unskilled, uneducated and unable to work” and that the harder a product is marketed, the more worthless it is.
The things that make a company successful are not the same as the things that make executives successful
I personally think people were “burned” by the whole NFT situation. During the NFT “hype” a year or two ago, a lot of companies were slow to get on board with releasing NFT products, and so they missed the bubble entirely. NFTs are, of course, silly but if they did take off, companies would have loved to have been part of the boon.
Fast forward to now and you have AI bros shilling AI in the same way cryptobros were shilling NFTs. However, this time it’s different! They have results, they have technology. Microsoft is on board! They have fancy tech demos which are not staged at all! If you didn’t have experience with the technology and limitations, you would be lead to believe that this is the same as the NFT bubble, but it’s actually going to be a real technology rather than snake oil.
I think there’s also the issue that it takes a long time to bring a product to market. Imagine you’ve spent millions developing software and hardware for your AI coffee machine or whatever and it turns out that there’s no market demand. You can’t really turn to your stakeholders and say “oops, we made a mistake and have to cancel this product. Sorry!”, you have to finish the product and try to recoup losses where you can. That’s why there’s all these weird posts advertising AI products - they can’t just not release a product, and AI bros might be tempted to buy it.
I also wonder if the whole AI hate is bias due to us being here on mastodonlemmy… We tend towards fairly cynical people who are critical towards new technology and corporations. Maybe actual consumers who aren’t online all day and clued into the tech scene are wowwed by AI. I’ve certainly seen people here casually remark that they use ChatGPT and Copilot.
I also wonder if the whole AI hate is bias due to us being here on mastodonlemmy…
Yeah, we’re cynical but we have every right to be.
I use ChatGPT, Copilot, and image generators for different things and I’m generally not on board with the blind hate because it’s been nice to have an assistant that can do all these manial things. But honestly, I’ve gotten mixed results and don’t see this tech correcting its obvious problems. The latest ChatGPT-4o release was great with its web browser, images, and speech, but it still struggles with accuracy to a tangible degree. Or worse, other companies use it for the wrong things as a cash grab to change perfectly working products. Even the applications that do seem perfect for it are not.
For example, I can’t get Gemini to answer anything but simple questions about Google Docs without it getting confused and repeating the same thing. Copilot will sometimes reach conclusions wildly different from the sources it cites. ChatGPT will give you suboptimal code samples, be subtly wrong about the meaning of words in other languages, or suddenly forget part of my instructions. And now people are adding it to the fucking coffee machine for crying out loud. I’d have a different opinion if it were more accurate most of the time and genuinely useful, but using it more often only cements it in my mind as a secondary productivity tool rather than the main feature.
I hope the hype dies down and AI is seen as an afterthought enhancement rather than a stupid selling point. Anybody selling AI now looks clueless to me.
You’re essentially describing FOMO. The hype bros are telling the CEOs “if you don’t offer AI then your competition will, and they’ll take all your customers.”
You can’t really turn to your stakeholders and say “oops, we made a mistake and have to cancel this product. Sorry!”, you have to finish the product and try to recoup losses where you can.
You can and should. You’re describing sunk cost fallacy, which is pretty close to universally understood as a terrible money vacuum of a flaw in our reasoning. (I would have made this comment if I hadn’t read Quit literally yesterday, but it really is an excellent book about the value of abandoning bad decisions when new information makes it clear that they’re bad decisions.) Buying time and raising expectations with a dead end nonsense tech might be better 6 months from now, but 5 years from now, being the guy that saw the writing on the wall that the continued investment was lighting money on fire will leave you better off.
LLMs have limited applications, and will in the future, but nowhere near enough to warrant the obscene amount of resource burn companies are spending to get there.
I also wonder if the whole AI hate is bias due to us being here on mastodonlemmy… We tend towards fairly cynical people who are critical towards new technology and corporations
Corporations, sure, but tech? Anti-tech people aren’t early adopters of new tech products. Early adopters are just generally more aware of the actual shape of the field than people jumping on hype trains once they’ve already started moving.
So firstly, if you were the person running a several million dollar project which then gets cancelled, you are absolutely getting fired. If you were acting entirely in your own self interest, it would be better to make the project last as long as you can. Maybe it ends up succeding by a fluke and you keep your job?
Secondly, you’re assuming that all that money just vanishes when the product is released. The product is still out there in the market, and there are still some people will buy it. If you’re 80% of the way through the project, it might be worth spending the remaining 20% in order to recoup at least some of your costs.
People cancel projects and keep their jobs or get new ones all the time. Having the awareness that a project is junk is better for your employment long term than running through way more money and still failing miserably. The people with money notice, and other high level executives notice. Moonshots fail. Pull the damn plug when it’s not viable.
You’re not 80% of the way there. You haven’t made a dent. Because the tech doesn’t work and isn’t capable of working. Every additional dollar you spend has a massively negative expected return. Chasing “make up your losses” on a project that’s dead in the water is virtually never a valid strategy.
Think like a venture investor.
A small chance of huge growth via new technology can have a big payoff. They expect most companies to fail and are more worried about missing an opportunity than losing money in a single bad investment.
Nobody is quite sure where AI technology will be in ten years, but if it’s big, it’s going to make people who got in early very rich. It doesn’t matter that it sucks now; the web sucked in 1995, but it made people who got in (and out) at the right time very rich.
It hypes investors. Investors are the customers.
Shareholders and investors are more profitable than customers.
+1 to this one. Shareholders are the real customers these days. I’d say there’s also a hefty amount of corporate peer pressure; “we’ll be left behind if we don’t move quick!”
AI is the new ad driven model.
Everything that AI touches, ends up machine learning content.
AI DJ? I now have your name your email address and every single taste you have in music. As you use the app I will gain more insight into more music that you are or might be interested in.
That roomba thats running around your house looking for socks and cables not to run over, is also image processing on everything in your house. We know how big your house is they probably know how big my TV is.
They’re not just farming your email and text messages to figure out what to sell you they know at a core intimate level what you’re interests are.
They’re in for a rude awakening in a few years. All of this AI information gathering is a bubble. You have companies like anovo complaining that they can’t afford to host a single website. All this AI training is not cheap and the return on investment is not great after the initial plunge right?
